THINKing

#tweeta20 - That’s A Wrap

Well, #tweeta20 - the social media project designed to raise awareness and funds for Thompson Child & Family Focus -  is behind us now and I think it was a success. I think we raised more awareness of the good work that Thompson does than we did money. Although we raised at least $4,000 via social media at last count.

Here’s how it happened. Friend Kathy Rowan (@PRQueen) works closely with Thompson and has for a longtime. She asked me to help with the project she had conceived.

First, we recruited  a great group of Charlotte Twitterati to participate and I’d like to recognize them once more.  I hope you will follow these wonderful people:

@CrystalDempsey

@AlexisAcosta

@ScottHepburn

@prettyannoyed

@beccabernstein

@daily_pinch

@lisahoffmann

@brandonuttley

@kateymarie

Next, we decided upon a catchy hashtag - #tweeta20 - to help track the stream.

Then, we:

- rounded up some Wicked tickets for a drawing from the pool of online #tweeta20 donors (oh, by the way, the winner was @ppnc09)

- pre-promoted the May 11 event to friends and followers to try to prime the fundraising pump

- developed Tweet Cheat Sheets for our 10 Twitterati to utilize and to keep us on message

- mounted a media relations effort to garner media interest, and this paid off with pre-event publicity from The Charlotte Observer and Fox News Rising. The momentum continues: WCNC-TV visited the facility the day after the event, spending two hours there filming.

- set up a Twitter account for Thompson and began following Charlotte, NC area people with the account

- set up a Thompson cause page on Facebook to involve our non-Twittering friends

During Thompson’s May 11 annual luncheon, its big fundraiser for the year,  our group sat at the Twitter Table,  twittering like crazy, utilizing two 4G Overdrive hotspots that @Sprint provided.

We’ve learned a lot about how to use social media for nonprofits, and I want to figure out how to translate this knowledge to other charities in our area. I’ll get back to you on that once I’ve figured it out.

Tweeta20 - A Non-Profit Social Media Pilot Project

On Tuesday, May 11, nine Charlotte social media folks and I will spend an hour trying to raise money for Thompson Child & Family Focus, an organization that has spent nearly 125 years providing education, treatment and support for children traumatized by sexual abuse, domestic violence or rampant neglect.

During Thompson’s annual meeting at noon May 11, we will sit at a Twitter Table and encourage our followers to Tweet A $20 or more. Each contributor of $20 or more will be entered to win two tickets to WICKED at Charlotte, NC’s Ovens Auditorium.

We’re using the hashtag #Tweeta20 in all of our social media postings  so we can keep up with the social stream, primarily from our Charlotte area social followers.

How can you help? I’m glad you asked.

• Follow Thompson on Twitter @thompsoncff
• Become a Facebook fan of Thompson Child & Family Focus
• Share news on your blog, in your tweets or Facebook status updates about the promotion and use the #Tweeta20 hashtag
• Follow our Tweets from noon to 1 p.m. on May 11 and please RT our #Tweeta20 tweets
• Go ahead and #Tweeta20. We’re taking donations!
• Send any other ideas you have to tweak our #Tweeta20 promotion.

It’s Time For A Social Media Takeover

It’s time for a social media takeover. But who should launch this bloodless coup? Marketing and advertising have historically been more about one-way communication. That rules them out.

I say it is the PR professional that should lead the charge. We have always been - at least in theory - focused on dialogue.

Many people think that PR is solely about media relations. Not so. PR is the management and development of relationships with any group that can materially affect your organization.

But is PR equipped for this job? Sadly, most are not. Like journalists, PR people have sometimes been slow to embrace new methods and new technology. I’d like to call on my peers to change that. We have always been the communicators interested in dialogue. New technology gives us the chance to truly have one-to-one relationships with journalists, customers and our other publics. We need to own the conversation, but we can’t if we don’t understand the new enabling technologies.

Let’s get out there and raise conversation through social media to a new level. Who’s with me?

Give It Up

Christmas is a time for giving, but somehow we’ve gotten this holiday turned around a bit. Every year I promote Holiday For Charity, a simple way to help charity during the season of giving. I just heard about a couple of other ways to augment the Holiday For Charity program - GoodSearch.com and GoodShop.com. Here’s what they say about the programs:

More than 70,000 nonprofits have partnered with a new Yahoo-powered search engine called GoodSearch.com, and online shopping mall GoodShop.com to enable their supporters to generate donations just by doing something they do everyday – search the Internet or shop online. What makes the system so compelling is that it doesn’t cost the users a thing. It’s a form of philanthropy that works for everyone in this tough economy!

Consumers are helping their favorite causes by shopping at GoodShop.com where they can choose from more than 800 well known retailers including Target, Apple, Macy’s, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, Petco and others. The shopping experience and the prices are exactly the same as going to the retailer directly, but by going through GoodShop, up to 37% of the purchase price is donated to the user’s favorite cause. In addition, GoodShop provides the user with coupons and deals for the stores so not only are they helping a cause, but they’re saving money while doing so!

Similarly, with the GoodSearch search engine, approximately one penny is donated to the users’ favorite charity with every search. You use it exactly as you would any other search engine (it’s powered by Yahoo so you get quality search results) and the pennies add up quickly – just 500 people searching four times a day will earn around $7300 in a year! It doesn’t cost the users a thing!

So, help spread the word through all your social media channels. Word-of-mouth can help make a difference this year.

Random Readings

A few things I’ve been reading.

Businesses: Get Your Social Media On
Almost 60 percent of Americans interact with companies on a social media Web site, and one in four interact more than once per week. These are among the findings of the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study.

Create Viral Content With Two Household Ingredients
Whether the communication is advertising, marketing or public relations, it all has a viral potential. Done right, and a message catches the attention of folks and spreads from one to the next.

Surprise For WOM Success
Emotional engagement is the key to viral marketing success. People share their everyday experiences by communicating them to others in and outside of their network. This social sharing is more rampant when the individuals develop intense feelings like fear, disgust, sadness, joy, anger and surprise.

Here’s To Knowing Your Audience
The first rule of communications, and thus the first rule of social media, is to know your audience. (Take a tip from Jason Falls and find out all you can about your audience.)

13 Tips On How To Have Great Conversations On Your Blog
What I do want to focus on in this post goes beyond getting comments and how to grow ‘conversations’ (something that I think is a little deeper). There is some overlap - but I hope this post goes beyond that previous one.

Word

The oldest form of media still is the best when it comes to spurring consumer action. Word-of-mouth from family and friends still is the most trusted source of information, despite all the hype about the digital world and social media. This is borne out by a Mediavest survey on trust in sources of political information. The survey indicates,

…the most credible and influential source of such information comes not from professional media outlets, but from friends, family and colleagues via word-of-mouth.

Now, I’m not saying that online social networks can’t be used to amplify your message through digital word-of-mouth. It can.  But you have to understand both the analog and the digital process of building buzz.

Gord Hotchkiss, in a MediaPost Search Insider column, says,

For some reason, we think buzz is a new thing that lives online. In fact, it’s as old as human behavior and has its roots in our very social fabric. We need to pass on information. We’re driven to do so. We gossip because it’s inherently satisfying, both to ourselves and to the recipient. But the spread of gossip through a social network is neither uniform nor consistent.   In the ’70s, Mark Granovetter discovered that, like many things, social networks are patchy, made up of tightly linked clusters of people who spend a lot of time together (families, friends, co-workers) which are loosely connected to each other through “weak ties,” more distant social relationships. The survival potential of a viral piece of information (Richard Dawkins first coined the term “meme” as a cultural equivalent of a gene in his book, “The Selfish Gene”) lies in its ability to jump Granovetter’s weak ties.    If the meme doesn’t jump out of a cluster, it ceases to propagate itself and can die an isolated death.

 GasPedal has an excellent post on developing your own word-of-mouth buzz program in 5 simple steps. According to the post, it’s as simple as finding your “talkers”, create a way to communicate with them (email would be my recommendation, as well as GasPedal’s), give them something to talk about, make it easy for them to spread the word and then thank them publicly.

Want some more ideas on developing word-of-mouth programs? Check out this THINKing piece.

This Is A Gas

Flatulence is funny, no matter how old you get. We had an opportunity to develop a viral website and animated videos that revolve around gas. It’s the only time we ever have used the word “flatulence” in a new business proposal. BernzOmatic gave us the go-ahead and the site now is online.

Feel free to check it out and “pass some gas” to your friends.

Cheaper To Keep

You’ve heard it all before when it comes to stats about customer retention. Some say that acquiring a customer costs five to 10 times more than retaining one. Repeat customers spend, on average, 67 percent more. After 10 purchases a customer has referred as many as seven other people. I’m not sure about the math, but I am sure that the underlying premise is correct: keeping existing customers is cheaper than getting new ones.

So, if your focus is on acquiring new customers instead of keeping the ones you have, you are off the mark. Here are a few thoughts on customer retention.

- Ask. New York Mayor Ed Koch was famous for asking “How am I doing?” He always knew where he stood, even if he wasn’t always happy about the answer. So, survey your customers about their likes and dislikes. Then, follow through with the information you receive.

- Profile. Learn as much as you can about your customers and then do something with that information to show them that you value them. Find out what makes a “best” customer and then put programs in place to move more of your customers into this category.

- Reward. Humans like to be treated as if they are special, and they will return to businesses where they have had these positive experiences. Reward them with special deals, or just pay a little more attention to them. In this era of digital communication, just sending a hand-written note gets you major points.

New business is exciting, I’ll admit. But it is the clients you have that will bring you the most success over the long run. Don’t spend five to 10 times more to bring in that new customer. Instead, invest a fraction of that to keep your customers coming back and referring similar “best” customers.

It’s In The Cards

I was talking to a young man last night whose company has filed for bankruptcy and he is out of a job. He already has developed a business plan and is preparing to start this enterprise. I applaud this action, since I am a huge advocate of owning your own business. Job security at a big company is a myth. You are much more secure when you control your own destiny. OK, sermon over.

The young fellow asked about what he should do from a marketing perspective: should he spend money on a website, should he advertise? His is a retail business whose customers will come from a defined neighborhood. From the dusty archive that is my brain, I dredged out the marketing pyramid.

At the base is corporate identity, business cards, cards for handwriting notes on, etc. The next level up is the website. I told him to invest in corporate identity, business cards and note cards. Because his business will be driven by relationships, I think he needs to spend his money on items that can be used to start and deepen relationships. He’ll need to do a lot of networking, meeting neighbors, collaborating with area business which are focused on his clientele. The business card and note card and two very powerful weapons.

My business card is below. It is not your standard card but ties in with our logo and our positioning. Printers can cut a die for about any size and shape card you want. This is the best money we spent when we started My Creative Team. Everyone says how “creative” they are. They play with them as if they were little people. They get passed around and they generate word-of-mouth.

We also invested in note cards. I send a lot of notes thanking people, asking for referrals, you name it. People are so digital today that when they receive an actual piece of personal mail, they seem to be truly impressed. All business is built on relationships. Sometimes it is one person in a business, sometimes it is thousands of employees of a corporation. The best communication tools, in my opinion, are those that help develop or deepen a relationship.

What do you think?

Bad PR Guy, Naughty PR Guy. Social Media Is Outing You!

Chris Brogan has an excellent post about a PR executive who blind emailed a news release to him a couple of days ago and embargoed it. Here’s the salient paragraph:

Dear Tom Mahon of CellSpin - I don’t know you. And yet, I have a press release you’ve sent me about your company, CellSpin, which will announce something at 9AM ET tomorrow, though I’m not supposed to talk about that until then, because you’ve asked me to embargo myself for news I didn’t ask for. Well, Tom, I think if you’re going to build an app that supports Facebook and MySpace, you might consider learning a lesson from them.

Pitching media people with an approach like this is ill advised, but trying to pitch a blogger using this technique in today’s connected world is suicide.

As Chris reported, the PR offender is Tom Mahon. Surely he has a vanity Google alert going for himself. Let’s surprise him with numerous posts.

And, by the way, thanks to Angel Galloway for coming up with the tag: socialmediabitchslap. I’ve used it on this posting.